Why Campus Rape News Coverage Is Failing Rape Victims

This year’s VIDA count of representation for women reviewers in literary magazines and journals is in, and the results are mixed: The Times Literary Supplement and The Nation are as abysmal as ever, The New Republic made good on a promise for change, the Paris Review lost some ground. But the coolest, most progressive feature of the 2014 count is that VIDA made an attempt to portray the representation of women of color, too. The numbers are as bad as you’d think, but maybe this will push magazines and journals to aim for racial diversity, as well. [VIDA]

Worst:

The Frisky’s own Beejoli Shah breaks down handily why the biggest problem with the now-retracted Rolling Stone UVA rape story isn’t that it was merely inaccurate, but that it’s part of a failure on the part of journalism to report on rape in a way that’s informative and helpful for rape victims. She says: “The majority of rapes that happen, by media standards, are incredibly mundane. Acquaintances and lovers with ambiguous boundaries of consent far outnumber brutal gang rapes like the one Jackie reported[…] But the media doesn’t deem these rapes worthy of coverage. The end result is there’s a lack of information about what women should do if their rapes are, for lack of a better term, boring. So they just end up not reporting them.” [Daily Dot]

Weirdest:

“Painful anime bags” are the hot new trend for lady-geeks — “painful” because they’re covered with fandom badges and pins that are painful for the bags and painful for the owner’s wallet. I dunno, man, they look like my super punk-rock bags from when I was a 16-year-old who paid too much for Ska Against Racism badges and Sigue Sigue Sputnik pins (JK you can never pay too much for that). A teenager’s gotta do what a teenager’s gotta do! [Kotaku]

Coolest:

Check out this photo gallery from St+art India’s New Delhi art festival, celebrating street artists from all over the world creating (frequently women-influenced) installations inspired by India’s cultures and landscapes. [The Guardian]